ABSTRACT
Evolutionists emphatically agree that differential socialization affects the expression and persistence of sex differences, but they argue that socialization informs only part of the whole story; increasingly, scholars in various fields have been exploring deeper, and complementary, sources of the variation. Over the past quarter-century, sociological explanations of sex differences have been increasingly dominated by self-proclaimed feminist writers. The feminist aversion to biology takes several forms. Feminists define patriarchy in various ways. Feminists frequently insist that evolutionary accounts are based on a naive biological determinism, namely the assumption that the differences between the sexes are not susceptible to environmental influence. Feminist accounts of sex-differentiated behavior typically begin with what by now has become dogma among most social scientists: the distinction between sex and gender. Feminist theorists almost invariably attribute such differences to aspects of male domination and the "manipulative morality" associated with patriarchal social structures.
